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Met’s Technology to Get With the Program

Stagehands change sets using a manual pulley system with cables and fly wheels; at right, John Sellars, the Met's technical director.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

In the Metropolitan Opera production of Berlioz’s “Troyens” two harnessed dancers representing Dido and Aeneas take flight in an aerial ballet. But don’t look for it when the opera returns to the Met stage on Dec. 13.

The duet has been grounded for safety reasons because of outmoded, worn-out stage machinery. It’s just one example of why the Met is embarking on its largest renovation since moving into Lincoln Center in 1966. It will be a $60 million job over the next five to seven years but lacking in the flashy type of rebuilding that has remolded Lincoln Center recently. This renovation concerns the guts of the place, replacements or upgrades for the Met’s internal organs: the flies, lighting, stage lift, air circulation and internal communication systems.

The Met’s technology has fallen behind European opera houses, where many of the directors bringing new productions to New York are used to computerized controls that produce precise results for increasingly spectacular shows. At the Met stagehands still twiddle dials, plug in cables, consult numbered charts and use a lot of muscle.

“It’s really old-fashioned technology,” the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said in an interview this week. “We work with it. We use it. But it has to be modernized. It’s safe without limitations in our use of it, but at some point it could fall apart. We’re not waiting for that day to happen.”

An internal planning document provided by the Met paints a grim picture. “Because of inertia and limited maintenance time, many of the stage systems are beyond their expected life span and close to failure,” it said. Directors these days require heavier scenery, faster moves and more sophisticated lighting, it noted. The Met’s high-definition movie theater broadcasts are also driving the need for change. Digital and audio technologies are becoming common, “both as part of the production itself and as support for broadcasts seen around the world,” the planning document said.

The Met was not significantly involved in the $1.2 billion Lincoln Center renovation of the last six years. The planning resulted in friction between the former Met general manager, Joseph Volpe, and Lincoln Center’s leadership. Mr. Gelb said that campus redevelopment money, about $4 million, was applied toward a $10 million project to replace Met stage wagons, on which scenery sits.

“What happens in any institution, when you’re very busy, things work, and you don’t fix them until they’re broken,” Mr. Gelb said. ”The Met’s needs were not as sexy perhaps as some of the other institutions,” he added. He said he tried unsuccessfully to insert renovations into Lincoln Center’s master plan, “but basically the program was over.” A Lincoln Center spokeswoman, Betsy Vorce, disputed that, saying that the complex was willing to extend the program, but that Mr. Gelb withdrew his request.

Past friction between the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center over a proposal to move the orchestra to Carnegie Hall also impeded the prospects of renovating Avery Fisher Hall, where the Philharmonic plays. Lincoln Center has since agreed to a renovation there, but it is not expected to begin before 2017.

The Lincoln Center renewal, which was formally completed two months ago, covered outdoor spaces and several buildings. Mr. Gelb said there were no immediate plans to make changes to the Met’s auditorium or public spaces of the house, except for possibly expanding restrooms, although, he said, “it’s hard to get a donor for that.”

Video

Excerpt: Modernizing the Met

The soprano Deborah Voigt and John Sellars, the Met’s technical director, discuss planned upgrades to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center.

The last major work at the Met was in the summer of 2010 when the company reinforced the stage with steel girders to support the 45-ton set for its “Ring” cycle. It has undertaken other piecemeal projects, like building an art gallery and gift shop and installing new lobby elevators. Met officials insist that the outmoded systems have not seriously impaired the work of directors. They just make Met stagehands and technicians virtuosos of the workaround, said John Sellars, the technical director. “It’s a real challenge not to let them down,” he said.

The first phase involves the fly system, which will be worked on mainly during the quiet summer weeks over the next four seasons. The stage lifts, air control and lighting systems should be overhauled within five to seven years. Central digital control will for the first time coordinate the movement of fly mechanisms that raise and lower scenery and the stage lifts. Roof repairs are included.

The fly system goes first because of its importance in raising and lowering drops, scenery and borders. Mr. Gelb said the cost for that portion of the renovation would be $15 million, with $10 million donated by Bruce Kovner, a Met and Lincoln Center board member, $2 million coming from New York City and the rest from other donors. In all the Met has raised $27 million for the renovations so far, he said.

Scenery and drops are attached to “pipes,” rectangular metal tubes that run the length of the stage. Cables attached to the pipes are driven by motors. There are 93 motors but only 30 drives to operate them. In the future each motor will have its own drive. The weight capacity for a single piece of lifted scenery will double, to 2,200 pounds, and so will the speed. Backdrops will have the capacity to be moved to within less than a quarter-inch of the desired position, instead of within roughly four inches. And they will be able to plunge down quickly, solving one of the most common complaints of directors, Mr. Sellars said.

“We can never get our curtains to drop fast enough. It can take roughly 10 seconds for some backdrops to fall the full 45 feet of the Met proscenium.

The overhaul will also allow slower drops. In the recently introduced production of Verdi’s “Traviata,” for example, a floral backdrop is meant to descend slowly, over roughly nine minutes, but the Met’s motors were incapable of such a controlled fall. So stagehands had to rig up a separate pulley system to work together with the motor.

The Met stage comprises seven lifts that run parallel to the footlights. The hydraulic cylinders that power them will be replaced. The Met plans to redesign and rerig its six lighting bridges above the stage. All the lighting will be modernized. The stage and the auditorium have their own heating, ventilating and air-conditioning systems. They will be combined and automated, reducing the unpredictability of air currents, which can cause giant backdrops just inches apart to collide (it has happened, the Met said) and wreak havoc with stage smoke.

Several directors who have staged works at the Met acknowledged that it had retrograde technology but praised the staff’s willingness to translate their ideas. “The Met is not the place that says, ‘We can’t do that,’ ” said Stephen Wadsworth. “It’s the place that says, ‘We can do anything.’ ”

Bartlett Sher said he expected that the chief impact of the renovation would be the rehearsal time gained from increased efficiency, especially given the complications of running four or five shows in repertory, usually with seven performances a week.

Francesca Zambello, the director of “Les Troyens” and the artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival, said, “Anyone who has a kitchen that’s 40 years old, you know you have to renovate it.” She said she did not feel thwarted by the move of the aerial pas de deux to earth. “It just gives me an extra creative boost,” she said. Now, she added, “it’s better narrative and more exciting and has more punch.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Met’s Technology to Get With the Program. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe